


Stay Hard, Stay Hungry, Stay Alive

by commoncomitatus



Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Gen, Nausea, Recovery, Starvation, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 19:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19216345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Early S1. Sandy has spent her whole life starving and suffering and struggling to survive; her body doesn't know how to live any other way.  Pigsy understands, Tripitaka grieves, and they each help in their own way.





	Stay Hard, Stay Hungry, Stay Alive

**Author's Note:**

> Will I ever be done unpacking Sandy's survival angst? Probably not any time soon. Apologies, as always.
> 
> Inspired by the exchange between Sandy and Pigsy in 1x05 ("Real gods don't cook..."), and all its heartbreaking connotations.
> 
> Written for Round 10 of [Hurt/Comfort Bingo](https://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org/), for the Wild Card square -- prompt: 'hunger / starvation'.

—

_Real gods don’t suffer_.

A lie, of course. One of many that she told herself over the years, more times than she could count.

_Real gods don’t starve._

_Real gods don’t feel the cold._

_Real gods don’t get lonely._

_Real gods don’t die this way._

True or not — and she knew it was not — it didn’t matter. It kept her breathing, kept her alive. It helped her to survive when she had nothing else, when she was starving and frozen and all alone.

_Real gods survive_.

And so she did.

She knew what she was, just about. She didn’t really know what it meant — god or demon, wasn’t it all the same down there in the cold and the dark? — and so she made it all up. Told herself stories to keep herself warm at night, wove cloth out of worthless words to patch the holes in her rags. Boiled them until they were tender, edible, and pretended they could fill her empty, cramping belly.

Gods were powerful. Gods were strong. Gods couldn’t be harmed by human or demon; gods couldn’t be killed by starvation or sickness or sorrow.

Lies. All lies.

But she had to believe something, and so she believed that.

Real gods did not suffer.

So she convinced herself that she wasn’t suffering either.

*

For their first night together as a team, Pigsy cooked up a feast.

He had begged, borrowed, bought, and stolen what seemed to be half a village’s worth of supplies, had stored them all in his pack before they left for the great unknown, and he put them all to good use that night, cooking up a storm of flavours fit for—

Well. Him.

“One last hurrah, eh?” he said, trying not to let the others see how much his mouth was already watering.

Tripitaka was understandably rather cynical, but appreciative nonetheless. “We could have put those resources to better use,” he chided, and then, in the very next breath, “Could I have another one of those fried potato things?”

Monkey was delighted, of course, but far too broody to actually admit it. He dove on the food like his life depended on it and made a point of not saying ‘thank you’, to Pigsy or anyone else.

Sandy—

Sandy ate what she was given, but she could not keep it down.

There was so much, _so much_ , and it was so long since she’d eaten anything at all. Three days, at least, possibly more. Her stomach was empty, cramping with hunger like it always did, but she didn’t realise how little it could actually hold, how little there was left of it after a lifetime of starvation.

She had never seen so much food in one place. She had never been in a position where she could reach out and touch, take, feast, had never been encouraged to eat and enjoy. How could she know her limits when she had never, in all her life, had a chance to test them?

She ate like they did, Pigsy and Monkey, because she believed she was like them: a god, real and pure and true. Real gods didn’t struggle with the smallest portion, real gods didn’t feel full after a few mouthfuls. Real gods could devour a banquet fit for a king and still want more when the plates were clean.

She tried.

She tried so hard.

But she couldn’t.

She was—

She fled into the forest when the nausea hit, and vomited in private, alone and ashamed. She didn’t want them to see her like that, didn’t want _Tripitaka_ to see her like that. He believed she was a god, he believed she was powerful. He believed she could help him.

She’d believed that too, once.

But that night, unable to keep down even a simple meal because it was too much, all of a sudden she wasn’t so sure.

*

Pigsy found her, a short while later.

He came with water, with a smile, without judgement.

Sandy didn’t know what to say.

She had lived her whole life as a scavenger. A week without food, then a discarded scrap or a lucky catch that would last days and days. She had devoured rats, mice, fish, all the while listening to their death-screams echoing inside her head. She knew the taste of bones and blood, but before tonight she had never tasted bread or broth.

She did not know how to explain that to someone who had lived his life in a palace.

Apparently, she didn’t have to.

“Believe it or not,” Pigsy said, “I understand what you’re going through.”

Sandy did not believe it.

“I know how you lived,” she told him, hoarse and sore-throated. “Every meal was a feast for you, ten times the size of what you made for us tonight. You can’t imagine being hungry at all, much less—”

She stopped.

_Real gods don’t starve._

He sighed, shaking his head. Then he handed over the waterskin, told her to drink slowly and carefully, and didn’t say anything further until she had drained it completely dry.

The water stayed down just fine. It always did.

If he thought that remarkable, he didn’t mention it. Instead, he took back the empty skin, tossed it to one side, and said, “The world’s been around a damn sight longer than you have. And so have I.” 

Sandy hunched her shoulders. “So?”

“You think I was in Locke’s service my whole life? Think I was born in that blasted palace?”

“Wouldn’t know,” she huffed, stubborn and sullen and still feeling sick.

“Well, I wasn’t.” He said it simply, with an edge but still with no judgement. His voice made her stomach churn anew, and so she looked away and stared instead at the terrifying, open sky. “Took me a bloody long time to get to where I was. A lot of hard work, a lot of proving myself. You think any old god can just waltz into a demon’s palace and find himself at her right hand?”

The sky made her feel even worse, dizzy and disoriented and faint with fear. There was so much of it, on and on forever; a person could drown up there, if only they could fall upwards. Sandy tore her gaze away from it, turned back to Pigsy because he was slightly less vast.

“Why do you keep asking me questions you know I can’t answer?”

He chuckled, but there was no mirth to it. “They’re rhetorical, you goose.” The insult, if it was meant as one, bounced off her miserable back; he shrugged at its lack of effect, then pressed evenly on. “I’m saying that I used to live that way too, before I got lucky. Hiding in the dark and staying out of sight, scrounging and scraping and surviving on scraps. Starving too, if you can believe that to look at me now.”

“I can’t,” Sandy said flatly.

“Yeah, well, can’t blame you for that.” He sighed, and for the first time she thought he looked regretful. “Point is, I was like you once. It’s no damn life.”

“It’s _my_ life,” Sandy said, with quiet vehemence.

For a long, heavy moment, he only stared at her.

Then, very softly, he said, “Not any more, it’s not.”

Sandy drew no comfort from that. Did he expect her to simply turn around and become something different in the blink of an eye, just because the tides of her life had shifted? To somehow unlearn a lifetime of survival and starvation and suffering, just because she was no longer all alone? He looked her in the eye, claimed to have lived her life, once, countless years ago, but it seemed he remembered nothing of it at all.

“Perhaps not,” she muttered, “but it’s the only one I know.”

He had no immediate answer to that. Sandy did not feel as vindicated as she imagined she should.

She turned away from him, angry and upset and uncertain of what to feel. She didn’t want to look him in the eye, didn’t want to see that smile, those dark glittering eyes, the impossible size of him, so whole and hale and healthy. She did not want to be reminded of the kind of god she wasn’t, the kind of god she could never have been.

Such a steep price, she knew, to sell his soul to a demon for a hot meal and a warm bed, but it had served him well in the end, hadn’t it? He could eat, he could breathe, he could live without having to survive and struggle and suffer. Looking at his big, broad body next to her scrawny limbs and shrunken stomach, she almost found herself wondering if maybe it was worth the price after all.

He stayed where he was, stoic and quiet, when she started to pace. Didn’t move to follow, didn’t tell her to stay still, to stop moving for fear of making herself sick again. He didn’t do or say anything at all, just stood there in perfect silence, watching and waiting for her to wear herself out.

It didn’t take very long. She was so drained, her body already past its considerable limit; she paced the length of the little grove maybe three times before she had to stop and sit down.

Head in her hands, hating herself, she tried to remember how to breathe without wishing she could stop.

Pigsy watched it all without judgement, and when she finally dared to look up, finding his face and challenging him to laugh at her for being weak, all she saw in his eyes was compassion.

“It gets easier,” he told her, hushed and respectful. “I promise. Your body… it’ll take time, but it will adjust.”

Sandy laughed at that, humourless and still hoarse. “To _not_ starving?”

“Yeah.”

He said it like it wasn’t stupid, like it wasn’t such a terrible, shameful thing, having to adjust to something as simple as eating a proper meal.

Sandy wanted to cry, so badly that her chest ached, but she was fairly certain that real gods didn’t do that either. So she blinked until her eyelashes chased the tears away, and then she ducked her head to hide her face and her shame, and she tried not to think too much about the holes in her stomach, the space that had been empty for so long it could no longer bear to be full.

“I don’t…” She swallowed hard, feeling her belly grow taut. “I don’t even know what real food tastes like. I have gnawed on bones, eaten dirt and mud and ash. Leftovers sometimes, stale and rotten and discarded like me, or scraps stolen from the shrines of the faithful. But real food… _real_ …”

The word reverberated, twisted into something new, something old:

_Real gods don’t starve._

_Real gods don’t get sick._

_Real gods don’t need to adjust._

_Real gods don’t need help._

_Real gods don’t…_

_I don’t…_

She was gripping her head again, she realised, callouses rough against her temples. Too tight, too much; she didn’t notice how hard until her skull began to throb, the pressure from her fingers becoming too intense to bear.

She tried to stop, but couldn’t. The pain paralysed her, made her feel helpless. _Real gods don’t feel pain either,_ she reminded herself, but that didn’t make it go away.

“Easy, now,” Pigsy said. “Easy.”

Sandy laughed again, ragged and hiccuping, a sound as pathetic as her body felt. “Is it?”

“Ah…” He grimaced, then sadly shook his head. “No. Afraid not. Sorry.”

“Of course.” With a great force of will, she dragged her hands away from her head, wrapped her arms around her knees instead, hugging her legs close and hard, trying without success to hold her body still. “I should leave.”

“Now, why would you go and do a stupid thing like that?”

“Because I am like _this_.” The word was a curse, a sob, a growl; it was too much, and yet it did not convey nearly enough. “How am I supposed to help Tripitaka if I can’t get through a simple meal?”

Pigsy huffed out a bemused breath. “You haven’t even bloody tried yet.”

Cynical, yes, and a little bit derisive, but serious as well, softened greatly by understanding. It lessened the blow a little.

But only a little. And that, too, was not enough.

“I shouldn’t have to ‘try’,” Sandy said bitterly. “Eating is one of the most basic, simple things in the whole world. It’s like drinking water or breathing air. A child can do it. A _human_ child can eat a meal without effort. So why can’t I?”

“You’re not a child,” he pointed out, as though that were an answer. “Or a human.”

“No. Apparently I’m less than both of those things.” She bit down on her lip until the skin threatened to break. “But I’m supposed to be a _god_.”

“Yeah.” His eyebrows touched his hairline in a bemused sort of challenge. “So what?”

She didn’t know how to respond.

How to begin to explain this to someone like him, who claimed to understand and yet so clearly did not? Whatever his life might have been before Locke, they both knew the creature of leisure he’d become since: gorged on luxury and comfort and excess, dripping gold, soft inside and out. He could no more remember what it was to starve than she could imagine how it might feel to look at a feast and feel something other than nausea and panic.

For him, it was a lifetime ago. For her, it was a lifetime.

Years upon years telling herself the same lies over and over and over again, convincing herself that they were true. Years upon years, her whole existence hinged on believing things she knew were not true. How could she expect him to understand what it was like, having nothing else? To feel it resonate in his chest the way she did, the lies she’d held as truth for as long as she could remember:

_Real gods don’t suffer_.

He didn’t. For him, the lie was true.

But she did. And she was the one who needed it.

She suffered and she struggled and she survived, a half-drowned sewer monster, alone and lost in the dark, a scrawny, wretched creature hunched over the body of a rat or a fish, blind and feral with hunger, tearing into its flesh as its screams echoed and echoed and—

She lurched upright, a hand pressed to her mouth.

“I think I may be sick again.”

He didn’t flinch. “No shame in that. Go ahead.”

The discomfort surged, as if in response to the permission, propelling her up to her feet. Swaying, lurching, sweat breaking out in waves across her whole body, she braced herself against the nearest tree, swallowing and swallowing and—

Nothing.

Her control, tenuous and tragic as it was, seemed to be enough, for now, to hold the nausea at bay. Still, she stayed where she was for some time, even after it passed, forehead pressed to the cool bark, shivering and soaked through.

Behind her, Pigsy exhaled tightly, like he’d been holding his breath in sympathy.

“You get used to it,” he said quietly.

Sandy ignored him. Had to, or else she’d lose more than just a meal. Her temper, more dangerous by far, and if she lost that for even a moment she knew that she would hurt him. There was no part of her body that understood moderation, that could hold itself in check when instinct took over, and her tendency to violence was more volatile than even her stomach. If she lost her temper she would hurt him, maybe badly, and then Tripitaka would hate her and send her away. And maybe that would be for the best, worthless as she was, but she was not ready to be abandoned again.

And so, pretending not to hear him, she said to herself, “I have endured the most unspeakable things. Why not this?”

It was supposed to be a good thing. Not starving. Having enough to eat, warmth and companionship, light and life. How was it possible that having all of those things hurt just as badly as surviving with none?

“Like I said,” Pigsy sighed, apparently refusing to be ignored. “You get used to it. You adjust, you learn, and you grow.” He waited until she broke away from the tree, until her heart and stomach had settled enough to let her stand up straight again, and only continued when she was willing and able to look him in the eye. “You’ve been in survival mode your whole life, yeah? That’s not something you can just switch off after one decent meal.”

Sandy took a moment to think on that, but all she could come up with was: “ _Before_ would’ve been better.”

“Before, after, not the point.” He shrugged, like her weakness was nothing at all. “Point is, it’s going to take time. Your stomach’s tiny. To survive the way you did, for as long as you did, it’s a miracle there’s anything left of it at all.”

“Apparently,” Sandy muttered, “there isn’t.”

He chuckled. “It’ll grow too, you know. Like the rest of you. But you’re just starting out; of course you’re going to have a rough time of it, you and your stomach both. You’ve gone from starving to feasting, from hiding in the dark to walking around in broad daylight, from isolation and loneliness to having a whole new family. And all that in the space of, what, a few hours?” His smile was tight, but his words were not. “Who wouldn’t have a rough time of all that?”

“I’m a _god_ ,” Sandy whined again. “I’m supposed to… to…”

But she couldn’t finish. Could barely even begin. There were so many things she was supposed to do, so many things she was supposed to be, and all of them so far beyond her reach. She couldn’t give them a voice, and she couldn’t close her eyes and will herself to become them either. She could only be what she was: a god who had never been a god, sick from not starving, shivering from not being cold, suffering from not suffering.

She looked at Pigsy, watching her with so much patience and pity in his eyes, and she wished he would say something but she didn’t know what she wanted to hear. Didn’t know if there was anything he could say that would help, any mix of words that wouldn’t make it worse.

She didn’t want to hear that it was normal, that gods suffered and struggled just like humans did. She didn’t want to let go of the one shred of comfort she’d convinced herself was real, the only blanket she’d had to keep her warm at night. She didn’t care that it was a lie, that it had always been a lie, that she’d always known it was. She couldn’t let it go, not while every atom in her body still felt so terribly weak.

But of course Pigsy couldn’t know any of that. Maybe he thought it would help, maybe he thought she would feel less alone, learning that she was not the only god to ever feel this way.

He must have really believed that, or at least some part of it, because he was smiling when he said, “You know, sometimes it’s actually harder when you’re a god.”

Sandy felt a kind of seizure jolt through her bones. Her body tensed, then started to shudder again, unable to process what it was feeling — fear, anger, pain, and an overpowering curiosity, all at the same time — and she had to hug herself hard to keep from breaking apart.

“Liar.”

Hoarse, raw, her voice shaking as hard as her limbs. Watching her, Pigsy only chuckled.

“Hand on my heart,” he said, “it’s true. We live longer than they do, you know?”

“So?” She was still shaking, despite the iron grip of her arms. Why couldn’t she just stop? “That should make it easier, not harder. You make no sense.”

“So I’ve heard.” This time, he didn’t smile. “Look, it’s a longevity thing. A human in your situation would’ve survived, what, a few years, maybe? Assuming the privation didn’t just kill ’em outright. But gods, we don’t die so quickly or so easily, you know?” His expression grew serious, sort of pained, and Sandy could tell that he was speaking now from experience. “Do you know how hard it is to unlearn a century’s worth of survival instincts? To suppress the reflexes that kept you alive for hundreds of years? To nurse a body back to health when it’s been sick and starved for a dozen lifetimes?”

Sandy was swallowing again. Not nausea this time, but something nearly as unbearable, a burst of pain in her chest so sudden and so sharp she couldn’t see. Tears again, blurring her vision, and she blinked and blinked until they disappeared.

“I knew he’d come,” she whispered, shaking with confession. “I waited so long with only the faith that he would appear. I knew it, in my bones, that he would come and I should have been prepared. I should have been _ready_.” The pain in her chest intensified, becoming almost unbearable; it felt like a vice squeezing her lungs, her heart. “I can’t help him if I can’t help myself. I waited so long for this moment, so long, and now it’s here I’m useless. I should have been prepared, should have been ready. I should have—”

“You couldn’t,” Pigsy interrupted, with kindness. “It’s not possible.”

“Lies.” Her voice broke. “I am a _god_ —”

“So you keep saying. But not even a god can make something out of nothing.” He winced when she failed again to understand, but if he was frustrated he didn’t let it show. “You can’t prepare your stomach for being too full when it’s still empty and starving. You can’t smother your instincts when they’re the only thing keeping you alive. You can’t make yourself ready for a new life when you’re barely surviving in the one you’ve got.”

He took a few steps towards her, but didn’t breach her personal space. Still, Sandy flinched back. “I should have tried harder. Should have done better. For Tripitaka, I should have…”

“You did fine. Better than fine.” The kindness in his eyes was a torture, a razor. “When you live that kind of a life, when all you have is a moment that might never even come… all you can do is try to make sure you live long enough to see it. And you did, and it has, and you’re here. It’s _good_ , you daft thing. You did _good_.”

“Not good enough,” she rasped.

It was a lifetime of pain, those three jagged words, and she could barely endure them. Somehow Pigsy seemed to understand that; seemingly with no effort, he found those rough edges and smiled them smooth.

“You’re a god,” he reminded her, wry but kind. “That’s what you keep telling me, yeah? It means you’ve got a whole lot of life still ahead of you. A whole lot of time to adjust and learn and grow, to _get_ good enough, if that’s what you want to do.” He spread his arms wide, hopeful and kind. “This isn’t the end, you know. Your moment came, now you get to seize it. It’s a _beginning_.”

“I…” She swallowed. Her stomach lurched, then gradually settled. Better, she realised with some surprise; she was actually starting to feel better. “Yes.”

“So begin.” Another step, and there he was, right in front of her. Not touching or trying to invade her personal space, just there, solid and present and real. A real god, who knew what being a god really meant. “Okay?”

Sandy didn’t know if it was.

She didn’t know if she was really capable of being ‘okay’, any more than she was capable of enduring a meal without making herself sick, or survive a night under the stars with no walls or shadows to hide herself behind. She didn’t know if that was in her future at all, a moment when she could answer that question — rhetorical or not — with ease and simplicity.

She didn’t know a lot of things.

But he did. At least, he seemed to. He knew, and he claimed to understand, the world she’d come from. Distantly, dimly, like an old, half-forgotten dream, but still he had lived through it. He knew what it meant to be a god, what they were capable of and what they weren’t. He knew things she never imagined she would have a chance to learn, and who was she to say that his words weren’t true? Hadn’t she been living on a diet of lies her whole life?

So if he told her this was okay, or could be, or would be… even if it wasn’t true…

“Maybe,” she said. Then, hesitantly, “Yes.”

Pigsy grinned. “Atta girl. You feel up to going back to camp?”

A simple question, but also difficult. Sandy’s chest ached.

“Maybe,” she said again. Then, in a burst of sudden panic, “Don’t tell Tripitaka about this.”

That surprised him. He blinked a couple of times, as though trying to make sense of it, then furrowed his brow. “Why not?”

“I’m supposed to be helping him,” she said again, slower now but no less urgent. “He thinks I’m a real god, a proper god, like you and Monkey. He thinks I can… he thinks I’m…” She trailed off, trembling all over. “Please. I don’t want him to think I’m…”

“He wouldn’t.” Pigsy’s eyes grew darker with compassion, lidded with a strange kind of sorrow. It was some comfort that he was taking her fears seriously. “None of us think that. Not even Monkey. And you know how insensitive he is.”

Sandy didn’t particularly care what Monkey thought, at least not about this, but she had absorbed just enough tact to keep that to herself.

“Please,” she said instead, again. “Just promise me you won’t tell Tripitaka.”

Pigsy was silent for a very, very long time. He studied her for a beat, then turned to study the tree she’d been leaning against, and then he looked up and studied the falling night as well, the setting sun and the stars just starting to prick the endless sky. He spent so much time studying the world around him, Sandy almost wondered if he had forgotten the question entirely.

Then he turned back to her, shaking his head, and her heart sank into her weak stomach.

“No,” he said, apologetic but firm. “Afraid that’s not going to happen. Sorry.”

Betrayal flooded Sandy’s chest, drowning the ache behind her ribs, swallowing the misery, devouring all her other feelings. Betrayal, and a feeling of vulnerability so profound that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

“Why not?”

The look on her face must have been a terrible thing, because Pigsy took a hasty step back. Face pinched and drawn all of a sudden, as though with nervousness, as though he was afraid she would throw herself at him with teeth and claws, afraid she would—

No. Not any more. She wasn’t, she couldn’t be, she—

She closed her eyes, counted her heartbeats, until the urge to do violence — always there, always lurking, even in her brightest moments — grew dim and faded, like the last dying breath of the day.

After a long, tense moment, when they were both sure she’d gotten herself back under control, he said, “Lots of reasons, if you want the truth of it.”

He looked at her, then, with wide eyes, like he desperately hoped that would be the end of it, that she would take him at his word on this as she had with everything else, but Sandy only gestured for him to continue. “Well?”

“Well…” He drew out the syllable, backing off a few more steps as he said it; Sandy couldn’t tell whether he was still a little wary of her or simply wanted to give her space, and she didn’t much care. “I mean… first: he already knows.”

Sandy’s chest grew impossibly tight. “What?”

“He already knows.” His smile was no comfort at all; it made her wish she was still angry. “There’s only one reason someone goes that shade of green, you know? Not to mention you were three seconds away from losing it all over his boots. He’d have to be deaf and blind not to have figured it out.”

“Oh.” The colour that flooded her skin now, while not green, was no less unpleasant. “I see.”

He chuckled, but let the humiliation slide. “Second,” he went on gently. “Even if he _was_ deaf and blind — and stupid to boot — that little monk depends on you. Depends on all of us, as it so happens, to keep him safe and protected on this little quest of his. If you’re not up to the task, he needs to know that.”

Sandy bristled, feeling the tension ripple through her aching muscles. It was her worst nightmare put into words: not being good enough, being unworthy, undeserving of a place at his side.

“Wouldn’t let it get that bad,” she muttered, hoping the dread didn’t show through too much in her voice. “I’d leave the quest before it did. If I’m not able to help him, I have no place here at all.”

“That’s…” He growled his frustration, but seemed to realise there would be no reasoning with her on that. “You know what, never mind. Third: we’re a family now. The four of us. A weird, dysfunctional don’t-really-know-each-other-yet sort of family, but a family just the same. And family doesn’t keep secrets from each other. You really want to devote yourself to Tripitaka, you’re going to have to do it with honesty. No lies, no secrets, no hiding. You know he’d never hide anything from us.”

That struck a nerve, rather more deeply than Sandy would care to admit. Hiding was all she could do, the only one of her talents she truly trusted. But Pigsy was right about this, if not the rest: Tripitaka was honest and kind and gentle, and he deserved the same in return. If she wanted to help him, she could not be hiding from him at the same time.

“I don’t want to deceive him,” she admitted cautiously, “but I don’t want to give him cause to worry for me.”

“Uh _huh_ ,” Pigsy snorted. “You know he’s going to do that anyway, right?”

The words made no sense at all. Try as she might, Sandy could not fathom their meaning. “Why would he?”

Pigsy blinked. Then he frowned. Then he _laughed_.

“Are you serious?”

It made her angry all over again, made the violence rise back up into her chest, her mouth. Like she was supposed to simply understand by instinct these things she’d never seen or known or experienced before. How sweet of him, she thought bitterly, to be so empathic towards her starved, shrunken stomach, to look down at his own and claim he understood, and yet in the very moment she failed to grasp something he believed was easy, suddenly she was blithe and stupid.

“Make a decision,” she hissed, feeling feral. “Either it’s understandable, the way I am, or it’s not. But don’t show kindness for one of my failings and then laugh at me for another. I will tear out your throat if you do.”

She meant it, too. And he could see that.

“You’re right,” he said, hasty but not insincere. “I’m sorry. That’s on me. The isolation thing… it’s not something I know a whole lot about, you know? Even when I… that is, even before Locke, I couldn’t stand to be alone. Just… couldn’t live that way.”

He shuddered, looking briefly as vulnerable as she felt, and that helped much more than the apology.

“I…” She didn’t know what to say, but she was sure she should say something. “Sorry to hear that?”

Hollow, yes, and as empty as her belly, but it made him smile so it can’t have been too far wrong.

“Right. Thanks.” He chuckled. “But yeah, you’re right. It’s not your fault you don’t understand why Tripitaka might care about you, just like it’s not your fault you can’t eat properly. It’s all part of the same thing.”

“Apparently,” Sandy said, still tasting venom, “I will ‘adjust’.”

“Yeah, you will.” He looked serious again now, and strangely intense. “And you have friends now. Friends who _do_ understand this stuff, even when you don’t really get it yourself. Friends who can help you, if you’ll let us.”

The thought was untouchable. Sandy didn’t know how to approach it, how to put those words together in an order that did not spark fear and horror. To depend on others, to let them help her…

She was supposed to be the one helping. She was supposed to be strong, heroic, a god. She wasn’t supposed to _need_ …

But here she was, lost and confused. Acid churning in her stomach because it couldn’t hold more than a few bites of food, her mind reeling and spinning because she could not fathom others worrying or caring for her, every part of her disoriented and dizzy because the world was so vast and so different from the lightless prison she’d made her home.

These things were not going away. They would not.

Not without—

Not without _help_.

Maybe…

Sandy took a deep, steadying breath, and swallowed down the last of her nausea.

“I think,” she said, very slowly, “that is something else I will need to adjust to.”

Pigsy chuckled again. No derision this time, it was warm and fond and sort of quietly relieved. Sandy was no expert in parsing emotions, but she thought she caught a flicker of pride.

“I know,” he said, and his massive body seemed to swell with so much feeling. “And that’s okay, too.”

*

It did not happen immediately.

It did not happen swiftly.

It almost did not happen at all.

Back at camp, Tripitaka tried to touch her, tried to smile at her, tried to show compassion. A monk through and through, he tried to be what he thought she needed, what a normal person — human or god — would need.

But Sandy was not a normal person — either kind — and every time Tripitaka came near, she flinched and backed away, upset and frightened in a way that even she didn’t fully understand. She couldn’t even look him in the eye without feeling sick all over again, a wave of it so profound that she began to shake and shiver, drenched with sweat and unable to think. She did not understand which of her instincts was reacting, or to what, but she could not fight them.

“Are you feeling better?” Tripitaka asked, realising that contact was off the table.

Sandy had no answer. And even if she did, she wouldn’t know how to express it.

“I starved,” she said instead. Not an answer, but an explanation. “For more years than you’ve been in the world, I starved.”

It was only as she said the words that she realised they referred to more than food.

“I know,” Tripitaka said softly.

Sandy swallowed. “I don’t know how to live any other way,” she went on. “I don’t know how to… what it means to not be starved. Of food, of warmth, of…” Her eyes locked with his for a fraction of a second, and her heart clenched. “Of everything.”

“I know.” The same words, but they sounded very different. “It’s okay.”

Sandy didn’t know if that was true. She didn’t know what to say, what to feel, how to respond, didn’t even really know if she was supposed to. A part of her still wanted to leave, to run away and disappear before she could become even more of a disappointment than she already was, but another part wanted to stay, to try, to take the opportunity Pigsy had presented and _begin_. She did not know how, and that was terrifying, but still, she wanted it. Still, she wanted to—

Still, she _wanted_.

And that was a new experience too. Being present enough in a place that was safe, having the freedom to think beyond what she needed, what she lacked, what her body was starved of.

“I don’t know…” She swallowed, wetting her lips, and fought to keep her breathing steady. Fought, in truth, to keep breathing at all. “I don’t know how to do the simplest things.”

On the far side of the fire, Monkey snorted. “Yeah. We know.”

“Monkey.” Tripitaka’s eyes caught the heat of the flames; for a moment, they burned just as brightly. Then he turned back to Sandy and the fire faded to ash and cinders. “It’s okay, Sandy. Really. This quest is a learning experience for all of us.”

His gentleness shook her like a blow. Sandy felt small and unworthy.

She turned away, squinting into the fire, staring at the scattered remains of their meal. Her body seized a little at the sight of it, her stomach churning as her heart cracked open; it was a struggle, remembering that one was empty while the other felt so full. Her failure, the food; the future, her new family, their bright eyes reflecting the flames.

“I feel…” she said.

But she could not finish, because she didn’t know of a word to capture all the things she felt.

She didn’t flinch when Tripitaka tried again to approach her. She held her body tense and taut, her heart hammering until her ribs felt sure to crack, but she did not flinch and she did not flee.

A success. Small like her stomach, but still, a success. A start.

In turn, Tripitaka did not try to touch her. He stood there for a moment, testing her boundaries, then deposited a small herb pouch at her feet and backed away, smiling warmly.

“For next time,” he said, by way of explanation.

Sandy picked up the pouch, frowning her confusion at its contents. A handful of small green leaves, serrated and strong-smelling, and some slices of a herb or root she didn’t recognise at all. Unsurprising; she didn’t know much about plants, herbs, roots, or the like, knew only the moulds and lichens of the sewers. But they seemed harmless and their strange, strong smell was not entirely unpleasant. Besides, Tripitaka was still smiling, watching her with affection in his eyes, and that was all she needed to know that they were safe.

“Medicine?” she guessed.

“Sort of.” The warmth didn’t fade as he retreated back to the fire, leaving her to study the herbs in peace. “They should help to settle your stomach. The Scholar used to make teas from them when I was young. I could…”

He trailed off, blinking rapidly, and turned away to hide his tears from the firelight. Sandy’s chest tightened with empathic grief, and she did not know what to say.

Blessedly, Pigsy did; he always did, it seemed. He stepped between them, wearing a smile just a little too big for his face, and said, “You see? Healing all around.”

Sandy tested the word on her tongue. It tasted strange and not at all pleasant.

_Healing_. Like mending, like recovering from an injury or an illness, from pain or grief or suffering. But real gods did not suffer; it was the one truth she held close and hard and fast.

_Real gods don’t suffer_.

So she had not suffered.

She had refused to suffer, had told herself again and again and again that what she felt was not suffering, that it was surviving, that it was living, that she was alive.

She did not understand why they thought her life was something that needed healing.

*

It happened slowly, but it happened.

Adjusting. Learning. Growing.

Pigsy helped, as best he could. He kept the bulk of their meals away from her while she learned to balance her limits with her needs, and gave her only what he thought she could manage. Sometimes he overestimated — sometimes she did too — and those days were unpleasant for everyone. But she learned from them, the frequent failures and stumbles and mistakes, and they did not feel so unbearable when they came with growth, with adjustment, with—

Healing.

Tripitaka made her tea, on those days, from the herbs and roots in the pouch. He spoke about the Scholar while the water boiled over the fire, eyes soft and voice thick with grief and love, and Sandy held her cramping belly and listened closely and felt too much.

Then, when the tea was cool enough to drink and her stomach had settled enough that she trusted herself to open her mouth, she spoke about him too.

“I didn’t know him as well as you did,” she said one evening. “But he changed my life even so.”

Tripitaka smiled that warm, sad smile, then sniffled and turned his face away, keeping his grief and his tears private as he always did. “I miss him terribly.”

Sandy felt that now-familiar ache in her chest. She didn’t know if she should say that she missed him too, this human she barely knew, this poet, this genius who had shaped the world and her life. Her grief was nothing next to Tripitaka’s; she wasn’t sure she had any right to share it.

So she hid behind her tea, swallowing carefully to keep from bringing it back up, and watched as Pigsy dropped a large hand onto the monk’s small shoulder and said, “He’d be proud of you.”

Selfishly, Sandy doubted the same could be said of her.

It didn’t matter, she decided.

She tried. She learned. She adjusted.

She grew, and she healed.

She learned what it meant to have a full belly, to eat only as much as she could bear, to listen to her body’s cries and remind it — quietly, gently — that it was safe now, that it would never again need to fear starvation. Sometimes it listened, sometimes it didn’t, but she learned, too, to be patient with it, and with herself.

She learned what it meant to look up at the vast, unending sky, and not be frightened by its size, then to look down at the ground and not be stunned by how dry, how solid, how clean it was.

She learned, piece by piece and day by day, what it meant to live without having to survive.

She did not stop suffering. The cramps in her stomach remained, transformed into something new — the pain of too much, different but no less unpleasant than the pain of too little — and there were places inside of her that would need so much more than a few meals before they could feel full.

She became useful, helpful, worthy, became the one thing in the world that she wanted — _good enough_ — but she did not stop suffering.

The bad days were fewer, but they lingered like a fever. It was still hard, still a struggle, and sometimes she felt exactly the same as she did for all those years, alone and unwanted in the dark underground; she felt weak, she felt worthless, she felt nothing but pain and humiliation and the most virulent self-loathing, and in those moments she told herself the same lie she always had, the only words she’d ever believed to be true:

_Real gods don’t suffer_.

But of course, for all her adjustment and learning and growth, she still did.

She suffered, yes, and she struggled, and she was terribly sick for a long time before her body adjusted completely. And on those days — the bad days, the awful ones — Pigsy would sigh and shake his head and remind her that he was that way too, once, that he got over it and so would she. And Tripitaka, smiling his warm, sad smile, would pour out some tea and then pour out his heart and his grief, and they would gather around her, these strangers who were her family, and share, quietly, the places where they suffered too.

Sandy saw her face reflected in their eyes. She saw her pain and her experiences, her starvation and her too-fullness; she saw everything she had ever struggled with, every ounce of suffering she’d ever known. And it was hers, but a piece of it was theirs as well.

It helped. It filled her like a good meal, one she could keep down without even having to try. It filled her and it nourished her, it kept her warm and strong and helped her through the bad days.

Helped _them_ through the bad days.

Together.

Pigsy, recalling his own long-vanished struggles, the early days in Locke’s palace, going through the same thing Sandy endured now, suffering and struggling and forcing his body to forget how it felt to be empty. Tripitaka, smiling with all the sorrow in his too-small too-big heart, talking about his father, his mentor, about the beautiful life he’d had before it all got taken away.

Suffering, all of them, together, and it didn’t make it less, to share it like that, but somehow it made it easier.

Her whole life, Sandy had told herself what she could not do, what she was not allowed to do, what she could not afford to do or feel or want or think. Her whole life, she had told herself what she had to do, too, what she had to become, what she had to endure. _Survival_ , ugly and violent, and all the starving and struggling and suffering that came with it.

Now, at last, she did not have to feel that way any more.

And now, at last, she was free to feel it completely.

Real gods could suffer, she learned, with Pigsy’s words in her head and Tripitaka’s tea in her stomach. They could, and they did.

But they did not have to suffer alone.

—


End file.
